Tag Archives: siliconvalley

Amaan Penang was faced with a life change when he moved from Texas to California to start a new job. While preparing for the move he started to examine his financial health and was surprised by what he didn’t understand about his spending and income. Using the popular financial tracking software, Mint, he started to examine his historical spending. In this talk, presented at the Silicon Valley Quantified Self meetup group, Amaaan explains how he tracks his data, crunches the numbers, and finds “interesting patterns” in his data.

We’ve posted some greattalks by Amelia Greenhall here on the blog and we’re excited to bring you another insightful presentation. Last year Amelia gave a wonderful talk about her weight loss journey and the power of using running averages. In this updated talk Amelia gives a more in-depth look about how using a 10-day moving average serves as an “early warning system” that puts helps put her back on the path of mindful eating. Filmed at the QS Silicon Valley meetup group

Ari Berwaldt wanted to better understand how his sleep affected his mental performance. In this great talk Ari explains his insights from tracking his cognitive skills using Quantified Mind and some surprising results about the lack of correlation between his Zeo data and his mental performance. Make sure to keep watching as Ari also explains some very interesting data and conclusions from blood glucose and ketone tracking during fasting. Filmed at the QS Silicon Valley meetup group.

Lisa Betts-LaCroix has been tracking her weight off and on since 2000. In this Show & Tell talk at the recent Silicon Valley QS meetup Lisa details the trials and tribulations that go along with attempting to track her weight and other associated behavioral variables. From simple excel spreadsheets to using Google forms to finally using the Withings wireless scale Lisa explains why and how she’s finally been successful at reducing her weight. Watch this insightful video to see what Lisa feels are the keys to self-tracking tracking and feedback mechanisms.

Imagine a few dozen people walking, running, jumping, jiggling their legs up and down, and introducing themselves to each other while competing on two teams. This was the scene at a recent Silicon Valley QS meetup hosted by IDEO. In the video below, David Fetherstonhaugh explains the fun, called The Step Exchange Game. The game was designed to mobilize people in large social groups to move around and meet each other. It was an exciting evening!

Self-described hacker Fenn Lipkowitz gives a rich update to his lifelogging activities in the video below. Fenn created a detailed diary with start and stop times as a simple text file, generating a color-coded chart of daily activities.

During his experimentation, Fenn began to read about the Life Extension Foundation and visited a site known as Longecity, a community of self experimenters who share experiences on the neurochemistry of cognition. In addition to monitoring and tabulating the time spent in various activities, Fenn also experimented with supplementation of various nootropic compounds to improve cognition and neural activity. The compounds he used included amino acids, vitamins, fish oil, and ginkgo extract.

Fenn discovered drastic changes before and after his use of nootropics. Subjectively, he used a numerical scale and quantified his level of energy. A graph showing a moving average of these values indicated a significant increase in his subjective assessment of his energy level.

Objectively, he performed typing tests as well as other brain training test found on Lumosity. His typing speed increased from a maximum of 92 to 143 after the use of nootropics. Fenn also lost 15 pounds, now has a girlfriend, and said he feels like a different person.

Another interesting component of Fenn’s lifelogging was his tabulation of all the food he ate over an extended period of time. Fenn found that his logging of food preferences has caused him to no longer be addicted to sugar. Fenn’s lifelogging website as well as the source code for the program that he used can be found here: http://fennetic.net/sleep/

Wako Takayama loves the smell of line-dried clothes. She also likes that it’s a way to conserve energy. In this video, Wako reflects on methods she developed to increase energy conservation after moving from an apartment to a home. Her personal experiences resulted in her becoming trained as an energy efficiency consultant and volunteering in a local organization that teaches energy efficiency methods and performs audits in the community. Interestingly, for dryer usage data, tracking blank days made her happy. (Filmed at Silicon Valley QS Meetup #2.)

She has always been wiling to be a participant in normal experiments; however, she now realizes that she wants her data to improve herself. Now she uses Genomera.com to run her own experiments that allow the participants to be actively involved in the process and openly share the data, observations and insights.

In this video she shares the results of the first Butter Mind group experiment and mentions how experiments usually lead to more questions, and now she is creating ‘Butter Mind 2’ and following her curiosity about sleep by creating another study ‘Orange you Sleepy’ – check it out! (Filmed at the Quantified Self Silicon Valley meetup at Stanford’s Calming Technologies lab.)

The entertaining and curious Joe Betts-Lacroix shares his investigation to decide which device he will use to track sleep. He includes how he uses each device, his opinions and how one device makes him feel that his sleep matters! (Filmed at the Quantified Self Silicon Valley meetup at Stanford’s Calming Technologies lab.)

Partners

Sponsors

Friends of QS

We recently started a program to invite QS Toolmakers to contribute directly to funding our events. We call this program Friends of QS. If you would like to participate we invite you email us to learn more.